Feldenkrais
It is a collaborative process. Together, we will explore the infinite ways you can increase your body awareness and change lifetime habits that are no longer useful. No matter your condition, injury or age, improvement is always possible. All it takes is curiosity and a willingness to pay attention to yourself. You’ll learn to move the way your were meant to move—gracefully, easily and effortlessly.
You will be empowered with the knowledge and tools to:
- Reduce stress and pain
- Restore mobility and balance for enhanced flexibility
- Improve posture and heighten athletic performance
- Breathe fully and sleep better
Feldenkrais 101
The Fundamentals: Mind-Body Connection Made Easy
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Like the conductor of an orchestra, your brain orchestrates every movement that your body makes.
- It sends neurological impulses to your muscles, joints, bones, ligaments, tendons in a highly co-ordinated way. Forget about cliches like “muscle memory”, “no pain, no gain” and “core strength”. Ultimately, better movement means improving how your brain creates and organizes movement.
- Just like you have firmly held beliefs and opinions, your body does too. Over time, it has fixated into deep seated, subconscious patterns, like your posture, and how you move, stand and hold yourself.
- Often these strongly held postural patterns create imbalances leading to muscular skeletal problems and pain. They can also limit you, preventing you from doing something that you once did.
- By tapping into the brain’s unlimited capabilities for change, you don’t need to live with these limitations or pain.
- This is where the Feldenkrais Method comes in.
- For more information see Feldenkrais FAQ.
Back Pain and Sciatica
If you’ve tried physical therapy, chiropractic and other treatment modalities with little success, Move2Live’s unique approach may help relieve your discomfort and prevent re-injury.
- You’ll first learn ways to immediately reduce your pain through breath exercises designed to mobilize the ribs and relax the overly contracted muscles of your lower back and abdominals.
- Instead of the traditional approach to back care that focuses on strengthening and stretching your core (back and ab muscles), you’ll stabilize and improve the function of your spine through a series of small and subtle exercises that explore how your hip joints, ribs and shoulders relate to your spine.
- These movements, combined with “gentle hands-on” lessons, will teach you to be curious and gentle with yourself and to focus on the smoothness and quality of your sensation rather than on range—how far you can go—which leads to efforting, pushing and pain.
By learning to pay attention to yourself in this new way, you’ll no longer be on “auto-pilot” when it comes to how you move and thus avoid movements that cause you pain.
Pelvic Health
The Move2Live Method provides gentle and non-invasive exercises that will help you find relief from incontinence, pelvic pain and dysfunction, hip and back issues and digestive and sexual troubles. Research shows that you can improve pelvic floor function at any age.
- You’ll learn to feel and sense your pelvic floor—differentiate the right side from the left—both in front and in back—so that you’ll be better able to activate and control your pelvic floor muscles in daily life.
- You’ll discover how to use your abdominals in a more coordinated way that promotes pelvic health. If your abs, for example, are overly contracted from excessive core work, your pelvic floor muscles might not be able to relax and let go. For optimal function, your muscles need to be able to contract and release—it’s a yin-yang relationship.
- You’ll expand and improve your breath capabilities. Breath is key to restoring pelvic function reducing pelvic pain.
TMJ and Jaw Pain
If you suffer from jaw pain and many of the accompanying symptoms—headaches, chewing difficulties, neck and shoulder tension and clicking, popping or grating when opening your mouth—you might want to consider Move2Live self-care exercises that will help address your discomfort.
- The Move2Live Method provides specific exercises to release your jaw, tongue, lips, eyes, spine and breath. The movements are gentle, small and slow and you’ll discover how to make them easy, fluid and smooth—the secret to jaw pain relief.
- You’ll learn how to mindfully relax muscles that are seriously over-worked and locked in unconscious holding patterns so that your jaw/mouth can move more functionally and efficiently.
- You will experience subtle but powerful hands-on techniques that will release deeply held tension not only in the jaw, but throughout you whole body, leaving you feeling relaxed and energized.
Posture vs Pain
Posture or rather posture in action matters. Did you know that poor postural habits often lead to chronic back pain, neck and shoulder tension or discomfort in your hips and feet?
Think of everyday activities that you do without a second thought:
- sitting hunched over at a desk which puts undue pressure on your spine
- unconsciously efforting in your quads or lower back to get up and down from a chair
- bending down to pick something up from your waist instead of your hip joints
- straining your shoulder to reach that glass on the top shelf because your weight is on the wrong foot
Learning to become aware of how you move and exploring different movement options will help reduce and eliminate pain and keep you healthy as you age. Move2Live will give you the take-home tools you need to improve your posture and stay fit, flexible and well.
